Makoni - 2004 Western Perspectives On Applied Linguistics

Western perspectives in applied linguistics in Africa
Sinfree Makoni and Ulrike Meinhof Pennsylvania State University / University of Southampton
The aim of this article is to analyze the nature of the historical and contemporary social contexts within which applied linguistics in Africa emerged, and is currently practiced. The article examines the challenges local applied Linguistics in Africa is confronted with as it tries to amplify applied linguistic programs emanating from Europe and North America. The article argues that seemingly progressive applied linguistic projects interconnect in consolidating a western view of Africa in postcolonial Africa. In this way these projects end up mirroring the very theories which they seek to challenge.
Keywords: Western and local perspectives, applied linguistics in Africa
Introduction This article like many others since the 1970s (see Towa 1979; Hountodji 1977, 1994; Mudimbe 1988; Masolo 1994) is a critique of western theories of African realities. Unlike earlier critiques which were mainly of religion, history and philosophy, this article addresses the eld of applied linguistics. It critiques not only western theories but also emerging Africanist responses to the alleged eurocentricism of some linguistic scholarship on Africa. (Mazrui and Mazrui 1998). The objective of the analysis is to create conditions which facilitate more independent production of knowledge about Africa in applied linguistics (Bates, Mudimbe and OBarr 1993), and avoid the pitfalls of critiques of western theories from Africa which inadvertently have ended up mirroring the very theories which they are challenging. The idea of focusing an article specically on western perspectives on Africa raises a number of issues which demand immediate clarication: (i) the label western in our title (ii) the apparent contradiction of viewing applied linguistics through western lenses while writing an article on Africa. Said, in his book Orientalism, comments on the conceptualization of western which is relevant to our overall argument when he writes:
Labels purporting to name very large and complex realities are notoriously vague and at the same time unavoidable. If it is true that Islam is an imprecise and ideologically loaded label, it is also true that the west and Christianity are just as problematic. Yet there is no easy way of avoiding these labels, since Muslims speak of Islam, Christians of Christianity, westerners of the west, Jews of Judaism, and all of them about all the others in ways that seem to be both convincing and exact. Instead of trying to propose ways of going round the labels, I think it is more immediately useful to admit at the outset that they exist and have long been in use as an integral part of cultural history rather than as objective classications. (Said 1978: 86)
The second issue we want to address at the outset is a focus on western sources while addressing issues about applied linguistics in Africa. In a recent study Prah points to the dominance of western scholarship in African studies, however misconstrued, a situation which is markedly dierent from that in China, where sovereignty of Chinese scholarship on China is widely accepted (Prah 1998:25). In contemporary scholarship, the same holds true for the Japanese, for India and the Arab world who have created their own epistemologies for studying their own cultures and societies. Yet much of our systematic knowledge of African societies is derived from and continues to be produced by western sources.
AILA Review 17 (2004), 77104. issn 14610213 / e-issn 15705595 John Benjamins Publishing Company
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Sinfree Makoni and Ulrike Meinhof
The real power of the west is not located in its economic muscle and technological might. Rather, it resides in its power to dene. The west denes what is, for example, freedom, progress and civil behavior; law tradition and community; reason, mathematics and science; what is real and what it means to be human (what is applied linguistics and what is not our addition) The non-western civilizations have simply to accept these denitions or to be dened out of existence. (Sardar 1999:44)
The historical and continuing hold of western knowledge over Africa does not devalue the importance of clearly articulated arguments aimed at developing African perspectives on applied linguistics which have emerged over the years (see for example, Mazrui and Mazrui 1998; Robinson 1996; Webb and Kembo-Sure 1999). In as much as we are critical of western perspectives on applied linguistics in Africa we are also at the same time skeptical of the validity of ethnicising epistemologies in applied linguistics in Africa as an intellectually viable way of reacting to the dominance of such western perspectives. The ethnicisation of epistemologies is typically expressed in the form of African Voices, African Perspectives, and we feel it forecloses rather than provides opportunities for continued debate. We therefore argue that some criteria for establishing local or regionally shared knowledge practices are necessary (Crossman 2003; Canagarajah 2002). In the article we explore ways in which diverse areas such as indigenous languages, the policies of the Summer Institute of Linguistics International (SILI) lexicography, orthography, New Englishes (NE), interconnect in consolidating a western view on Africa in the postcolonial period in spite of the seemingly progressive and egalitarian developments encaptured in them. Historical contexts in which applied linguistics in Africa emerged Because language has always been a companion of imperialism and Empire (Hardt and Negri 2000) it can be argued that there has always been one version or other of applied linguistics in Africas colonial and neocolonial encounters with the west. Deliberately misreading Kaplans (1980) argument that there is no site in which applied linguistics cannot play a role, we suggest, that there is no historical period of African colonial and postcolonial encounters with the west and where ethnic groups have been in contact within a polity, which did not include some version of applied linguistics. To understand the nature of these we propose a distinction between applied linguistics as a formal discipline and applied linguistic activities (Makoni and Meinhof 2003: 4). We construe applied linguistic activities to refer to applied linguistic projects such as lexicography or the development of language teaching materials to facilitate the acquisition of African languages. These were carried out in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in Africa either as part of mission linguistics, or as part of a concerted colonial policy of control and containment (Cohn 1996). These applied linguistic activities predated the emergence of applied linguistics as a formal discipline, which did not take place until the late 1950s and early 1960s. Historically, this much later inauguration of applied linguistics proper coincided with Africas decolonization. The emergence of applied linguistics as an academic discipline in Africa was, in part, driven by the British concern about the quality of English language teaching after the end of British colonial rule-as if the impending loss of explicit and formal British colonial control compelled the British to rediscover the importance of English in postcolonial Africa. The British Empire was giving way to the empire of English (Phillipson 1992: 1). The concern about the quality of English language teaching after Africas ag independence is revealing because during the colonial period the British were less preoccupied with the teaching and learning of English particularly at primary school levels, but rather with the development of what in our view is incorrectly described and conceptualized as a series of indigenous languages. We shall return below to the implications this has for the prolic eld of language planning in Africa. The decolonization of Africa and the Cold War period also resulted in a greater US involvement in Africa. Academically this contributed towards the establishment and owering of what became known as African Studies in the US. African Studies is a western project, a way of explaining
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the other in the western mind (Prah 1998: 31). Particularly in the USA a strand of African applied linguistics was subsequently subsumed within African Studies. However, the objective of this strand of applied linguistics in African Studies was not to create applied linguistic alternatives, but alternatives to applied linguistics. If applied linguistic activities were shaped by and contributed to shaping colonialism, applied linguistics as a discipline in Africa is still struggling to confront the hold of what Hardt and Negri (2000) aptly refer to as Empire because with political independence in Africa has come no freedom from the imperial grip (and local African dictatorship we hasten to add), but mediated command. The example par excellence is French West Africa which by way of a sophisticated and somewhat Machiavellan French strategy was divided into a dozen potentially functional, but in reality dysfunctional newly independent states. Nominally independent, these countries were dysfunctional from their inception because of their small populations and tiny national economies coupled with a convertible currency. These factors made these states poor countries with a currency of rich people Charles De Gaulle quoted in Breton (2003: 207). With political systems which had no robust institutional past nor political structure (Breton 2003: 206), the newly independent African countries, particularly former French countries became more rather than less dependent on France after they had attained independence. This created ideal conditions for Africas neo-dependence or extraversion (Crossman 2004: 40) as Africanists prefer to call it in economic terms as well as in the academic sector, especially as regards our own discipline. Applied linguistics in particular has not yet systematically confronted its own colonial legacy as other disciplines in Africa such as anthropology (Prah 1994: 95), which has shown considerable reexivity under the pervasive inuence of colonial and postcolonial theories. We therefore conclude our essay with some recommendations on how applied linguistics particularly in higher education might be developed as a strategy to construct and initiate new and alternative futures in our discipline. The inauguration of applied linguistics as an academic discipline was important because it occurred at an important historical juncture in Africas decolonization process ushering in a new epistemological trend in language studies in Africa. While the main focus of applied linguistic activities in the colonial period had been the construction and development of African languages for Europeans, applied linguistics as a discipline concentrated on the teaching and learning of European languages by Africans. This led in some parts of Africa, particularly South Africa, to a conceptualization of applied linguistics as synonymous with English language teaching (Young 2001). The trend of using indigenous languages as key sites of applied linguistics was to be continued by the Summer Institute of Linguistics International (SILI) and its domestic arm the Wyclie International (WI) previously known as the Wyclie Bible Translators. WI is generally responsible for the domestic fund raising of the SILI in the US. According to its own stated mission, the goal of the SILI is to bring the word to Bible-less tribes (Laitin 1992: 98). SILI was to be one of the key International Organizations which was to subsequently shape and inuence the direction of applied linguistics in Africa. Besides the SILI, there are other organizations which have contributed to the development of applied linguistics in Africa such as the Ford Foundation, the French sponsored Comit Linguistique Africaine Africain Dakar (CLAD), and the British Council (Laitin 1992: 98). Until recently AILA was not one of the major forces in the development of applied linguistics in Africa. There is only one AILA aliated association in Africa, the Southern African Association of Applied Linguistics (SAALA) which in spite of the Southern African nomenclature concentrates largely on applied linguistics in South Africa. SAALA was formed in 1980, during the period of academic boycott of South Africa when it was not strategic to use South Africa in the title of the association. There are, however, some other associations such as the Linguistic Society of Southern African Universities, the Linguistic Society of Nigeria and the English Studies of Nigeria which amongst other areas also engage in some applied linguistic research, but the inuence of these associations pales in comparison to the historical and on-going impact of SILI.
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It is not our objective to provide a comprehensive summary of all applied linguistic activities in Africa. Given the diversity and range this would be an impossible undertaking. Our objectives are much more modest than that. We have three main aims: First to examine how western perspectives are embedded in seemingly progressive areas of applied linguistics in Africa. Secondly, to analyze the contradictions which emerge in African attempts at amplifying such projects. Thirdly, to discuss ethnicising epistemologies in Africa as a reaction to the dominance of the west in applied linguistics in Africa, and thus show their problematic nature. Lexicography in applied linguistics in Africa Christianity, lexicography, anthropology and more recently descriptive linguistics particularly corpus linguistics, have been the key driving forces behind the development of Africas modern day lexicography (Prinsloo and de Schruyver 2001, 2002). Lexicography in Africa has its origins in word lists, Vocabulary-collecting was something visitors to the continent did (Irvine 2001: 79) The earliest word lists were produced between 1643 and 1660 by Jesuit and Capuchian priests. Most of these early dictionaries were bilingual and were produced for European language learners of African languages. For example, a quadrilingual dictionary of Italian, Latin, Spanish and kiKongo was published in 1650, predating by about a century the famous monolingual English dictionary by Samuel Johnson which was published in 1755 (Benson 2001). The dictionaries together with the language primers produced during the colonial period were targeted at Europeans. As other language teaching materials used to teach African languages, they are extremely revealing about the nature of European perspectives on Africans and their languages, and if seen from a contemporary African stand point are amenable to charges of eurocentrism. However, eurocentrism in this case should not be dened negatively, since such a critique suggests denigrating lexicographers for succeeding in their objectives. Not all 19th century lexicographers were Europeans, one notable exception was the Nigerian Samuel Ajayi Crowther who wrote a dictionary on his rst language, Yoruba. He also worked on a range of other West African languages, notably Temne, Igbo, Nupe and Hausa (Irvine 2001: 77). It is also important to stress that in the 19th century there was a much closer relationship between literary studies and the study of African languages in two key respects, in terms of the source material which was used, and in what applied linguistics today might call the genre used in the linguistic studies of African languages. The source material included proverbs which were seen as an important component of lexicography. Currently studies in proverbs are seen more as a key component of oral African literature than of applied linguistics in Africa. The dictionaries were also not only written for their linguistic sophistication but for their literary merits as well (Irvine 2001: 64). The applied linguistic question worth posing is thus not so much whether the dictionaries and primers were Eurocentric as such, but rather focus on the eects of the eurocentrism when the dictionaries and primers were subsequently used in the provision of literacy in African education. Rather than targeting childrens own cultural life dictionaries and language teaching materials were resources for the learning of African languages by Europeans as part of a strategy of containment. Underlying the policy of containment was the belief that one way to control people is to create European versions of African languages, and subsequently superimpose them when used as medium of instruction. There have been extensive and on-going discussions on linguistic imperialism and the suppression of vernaculars (cf. Phillipson 1992; Davies 1996; Joseph 2004). Our perspective on this important topic is slightly dierent. Historical evidence shows that in African contexts, and particularly in British colonies, it was the victorious who were keen to learn the languages of the defeated rather than the other way round. Hence in such contexts linguistic imperialism is not to be seen as the imposition of a colonial language on the colonized but entails the imposition of a colonial
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version of an indigenous language on Africans. For example, in the Republic of the Congo, the colonial indigenous variety associated with the state was referred to as the kikongo ya leta (The kikongo of the rock) and kikongo ya matari (The kikongo of the stone breaker) (Mufwene 2001:176). The chiShona associated with the state and missionaries in Zimbabwe was called chibaba the language of the missionaries (Chimhundu 1992). It is these versions which became the local vernaculars used as medium of instruction. Our perspective of linguistic imperialism also entails a redenition of expertise in African languages: in this case a shift from oral performance to textual analysis. As a rule, most of the analysts adept at textual analysis were either European professional linguists who typically had learnt African languages as second languages or they were western educated Africans. Thus the native speaker was displaced as a legitimate expert in his/her own language. Currently, there is considerable interest and excitement in a more innovative production of African language dictionaries based on electronic corpora (Prinsloo and de Schryver 2001, 2002). The relative ease with which African corpora can now be established has led to a proliferation of corpusbased dictionaries often covering closely related languages/language varieties as is illustrated in the following lexical items:
Table 1. A comparative analysis of the Bemba/Lamba & Kaonde lexicon English All Animal Ashes Belly Big Bone Bemba Onse Nama To Fumo Kulu Fupa Lamba Onsi Nyama Toi Kati Kulu Fupa Kaonde Onse Nyama To Vumo Katampe Kupa
(Kashoki and Mann 1978: 8293).
It is questionable whether it is justiable to compile separate dictionaries for Bemba, Lamba, and kaonde because of the considerable similarity in spite of the dierent labels. The converse does apply, that in some cases considerable diversity is masked by using a single language label. For example, there is both lexical and grammatical variability within Swahili. As illustrated in the following:
Table 2. A Comparative analysis of Ugandan kiSwahili and Tanzanian KiSwahili KiSwahili (Uganda) Bado Nguo za serikali Maktab Ndito Muro
(Mukama 2002: 67).
Swahili (Tanzania) Mapema Sare Osi misicha chakula
English Soon Uniform Oce Girl Food
The dierences also apply at a grammatical level. For example, Swahili in Uganda operates with 910 noun classes, while Swahili in Tanzania like any other Bantu languages has over 20 noun classes. Noun classes are the central organizing principle for the organization of Bantu languages. The presence of diversity within the same label does not preclude the possibility of compiling a single dictionary which accommodates that diversity. Research and dictionaries on African especially South
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African sign language (Penn and Reagan 1991, 1995, 2001; Reagan 1996) provide examples of how this can be achieved. In enumerating dierent types such as American sign language, British sign language, pidginized sign languages, they reect the great diversity within sign languages. Penn and Reagan (1995) report that 98% of the words they compiled were represented by more than one sign. But the dictionary was compiled in such a way as to accommodate that range of diversity. Rather than seeking to compile a dictionary for each variety which, as the above examples illustrate, might entail producing dictionaries which greatly overlap with one another, it should be feasible to compile a common dictionary, especially in situations of limited nancial resources. To us the model to follow is not the development of one dictionary for each variety but a pluralistic one: the one dictionary = many varieties model reected in African sign language research and indeed in the dictionary of South African English which incorporates the dierent varieties of South African English in its tradition. The South African lexicographical tradition started in 1913 under the auspices of Pettman (1913) cited in Bolton (2004), and continued to the present day with Branford (1987), and Silvas (1998) monumental dictionary of South African English on Historical Principles (Bolton 2004: 381). Sociolinguistics of urban vernaculars In the sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic literature it is treated as established fact that in Africa code-switching and mixing are extremely widespread (McCormick 1995; Myers-Scotton 1993; Kamwangamalu 1998; Slabbert and Finlayson 2002). There are three discernible orientations towards code-switching and mixing research: psycholinguistic, sociolinguistic and linguistic. The objective of this section is not to review the voluminous literature on code-switching and mixing, but to examine the assumptions which form the basis of this literature, to investigate what it might tell us about the researchers perceptions about Africa. From the perspective of an educated speaker it is plausible to assume that code-switching and mixing is the result of the speaker/authors choice of linguistic material from dierent languages. This assumption is particularly valid for educated speakers who have been exposed to school language versions, since as a rule School language is unmixed. However, whilst this may hold for educated speakers, it may not necessarily be true of non-educated speakers. For such speakers, unmixed forms are an exception, whereas the norm is a linguistic amalgam based on material from diverse languages as illustrated in the two extracts below. The mixing may occur so frequently and so pervasively that it constitutes the norm for those speakers. The following two extracts illustrate the extent to which the mixing may be so intricately intertwined that it might be more plausible to describe it as a single code rather than a product of two or more separate codes. Thus what may be perceived analytically as bilingualism and a hybrid language from an analysts perspective may indeed be a form of monolingualism from a noneducated language users perspective. It is important to stress that when we call a language a hybrid we are making statements about its history, that it, is derived from many sources, but as we all know people do not necessarily inherit the history of their language when they are learning it!
Extract 1 Mi igioinki ki ndozala (Im on my way to the market) contains words from dierent languages: mi (I < Swahili mimi), gouink (go < English going), ki (LOC.,) French qui and ndozala (market < Lingala zando) (Goyavertz 1996: 125)
These mixed forms are not restricted to spoken medium only, but are apparent even in written discourse, and at times include dierent writing conventions as illustrated in the following extract from an electronic communication:
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English in normal font, chiShona in italics, informal discourse in bold Extract 2 Hi sekuru (uncle) compliments of the new year, I hope makapinda mairi mushe mushe. (you had a pleasant new year) Do you know how long the PR (permit res) is gonna take?
The short extract above seems to be an amalgam of dierent languages, and dierent styles and writing conventions. From the perspective of an educated analyst, it may be assumed that the author is astutely combining dierent styles and languages. But from the perspective of the language user, what a western educated linguist may construe as a mixture might simply be a single code albeit variable in the way in which it brings together elements from dierent languages. To describe the codes as chiShona and English may be introducing distinctions which although available in the analysts mind are absent from the speakers perspective. Most of the speakers and writers of the linguistic amalgams do not necessarily have separate competence in the named languages. But when they do not know the languages in the unmixed forms, is is not plausible to argue that they are combining material from dierent languages. The truth may be that for many African speakers whether in speech or writing it may now be impossible to separate African languages from dierent varieties of English. We may be witnessing a formation of a linguistic amalgam which is so complete that even for some educated speakers it may be dicult to identify the dierent varieties. Nor are they strictly speaking street languages restricted to urban areas since such mixes are even recorded in rural areas. It is the urban vernaculars which now constitute a threat to indigenous African languages and not English. We refer to the linguistic amalgams as urban even though they are spoken in rural communities as well because they transcend physical location and stand in sharp contrast with indigenous (standardized) African languages deemed to be rural (Cook 2002: 108; Finlayson, Calteaux and Myers-Scotton 1998). Thus Urban and rural are not understood not as purely geographical locations only but as key aspects of an individuals identity, articulated in part through language. It is an open question whether it is appropriate to dene the urban vernaculars as languages. One possible way of dening them would be to regard them simply as expressive inventories, that not only enable people to communicate with each other, but also allow people to communicate something about themselves (Cook: 2002: 111). These expressive inventories pose a serious conceptual challenge to the neocolonial constructions of African languages which underpin most of the notions about language in language planning in Africa. From a western perspective, the spread of the urban vernaculars such as Town Bemba in Zambia, Iscimatho in South Africa, Wolof in the Gambia and Senegal is of interest because although language loss is rare in Africa, its the urban vernaculars and not ex-European languages such as French or English which constitute a threat to indigenous African languages. In situations of economic collapse, petty trading is one of the key professions, and it requires the command of urban vernaculars more so than either French or English, or indigenous African languages. More importantly, English is closely tied to western models of modernization, Christian conversion and modernist social and capitalist development which since the late 1980s has come to represent a deadend for most suburban dwellers (Devisch 1995, 1999). While the endangerment of indigenous languages may be read as potentially catastrophic by some linguists, from an Africanist perspective, the spread of the urban vernaculars reects the extent to which African speakers are creatively adapting to new urban contexts. This underscores the importance of sociolinguistic frameworks which would be able to capture the nuances of the local contexts An attrition framework may not be relevant (Mufwene 2001, 2002, 2004). The issue of language endangerment raises fundamental problems about the underlying notions of language, and the relative importance being attached to speakers as opposed to the languages themselves. We would like to argue that the endangerment of language does not necessarily mean the endangerment of the speakers of those languages. Indeed the creative adaptation by urban African speakers may enhance rather than reduce their chances of survival (Mufwene 2004).
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In Africa according to Brenzinger (1998) 54 African languages are already extinct, and another 116 are at various stages of extinction. The statistics of the numbers of endangered languages raises issues which are extremely important in applied linguistics in Africa. It touches directly on the issue of enumerability/countability of languages in Africa. We are not questioning either the statistics of the number of existing African languages nor the ones regarded as threatened or indeed the numbers of those regarded as likely to be extinct. What we seek to draw attention to is a much more fundamental problem. We are seeking to challenge the nature of the linguistic thinking, which makes it possible to think in terms of the enumerability of those languages in the rst instance, and to foreground the role of enumerability as one of the modalities of governance. To census is an important gesture of power (Hill 2002: 127). Analytically, urban African vernaculars are comparable though not equivalent to creoles in so far as they arise in contexts of extreme domination (slavery, apartheid) and where one more or less dominant group presides over several subordinate groups. The new social contexts created by the political/economic formation, (e.g., urban centers and shantytowns rather than plantation) create new identities and ethnicities. Depending on the specic historical and social setting, urban vernaculars arise to express and complement these new identities, drawing from the linguistic landscape in dierent ways and gender-specic ways (Spears personal communication). For example, male urban vernaculars in South Africa draw more upon Afrikaans, than English, while the converse is true for young Black female South Africans (Cook 2002) analysis of street Se Tswana in South Africa. An analysis of language mixing in urban vernaculars provides an invaluable opportunity for understanding the nature of language contact in real time. Although we are not claiming that urban African vernaculars are creoles or pidgins as such, an analysis of the urban vernaculars sheds light on the processes which pidgins and creoles underwent because of the similarity in the basic processes of variation and simplication. That urban vernaculars are being acquired as rst and second languages pose important sociolinguistic questions with crucial educational implications. Is it always necessary to standardize languages if they are to be used and taught educationally? Without a standard variety what type of language teaching materials would be useful? We suggest that in that case such materials should reect the heteroglossic (Bakhtin 1981) nature of African sociolinguistics; the materials should therefore be made up of diverse authentic texts. Although standardization might be useful in some contexts, it is possible that the absence of a single standard relieves users of urban African vernaculars of the intense pressures of a monolithic standard. If the urban vernaculars are subsequently standardized, one challenge is how to produce an orthography which allows variation within it. Issues about orthography have been at the core of a great deal of research into African languages, because of the inconsistencies within the orthography. At times the same language may also have more than one orthography (Yanga 1980, 1998; Nyombe 1977). A solution might be to have a general agreement about the phonetic values of the letters, but no standard spelling for individual words. English followed a similar pattern for centuries one could encounter the same word on the same page, spelt dierently. African varieties of English-initiating an African response to new Englishes The New Englishes (NE) paradigm has been extensively used by some of Africas most prolic and talented applied linguists (Owusu-Ansah 1991;Kamwangamalu and Chisanga 1997; Arua Arua 2001; Dako 2001; Gough 1996; Wolf and Igboanuasi 2003; Letsholo 2000; Moyo and Kamwangamalu in press) to analyse the ways in which phonologically, lexically, semantically, and pragmatically English has been adapted to Local African contexts in Nigeria, Cameroon, Ghana, Swaziland, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Botswana and more recently the Sudan. NE research has thus served as a counter to centrist arguments about English. However, the main focus of our analysis is dierent. We explore
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the ideological implications of using NE within African contexts from the perspective of a majority of Africans with restricted, if any prociency in English as a way of shedding light onto the status of English in Africa. A comparable ideological analysis of NE within non-western contexts has been carried out in Asia (Canagarajah 1999; Dasgupta 1993; Krishnasway and Burde 1998; Kandiah 1998). In New Englishes the sociolinguistics of landscape of Africa seems to be viewed through the prism of a national identity, and a national culture (Leitkultur (Nigerian English, South African English, Zambian English etc). Because the main prism is that of a nation state, the research overlooks the inescapable historical, economic and cultural inter-dependencies of contemporary Africa and the modern world. Such interconnections might shape the use of language particularly of English in Africa much more strongly than the nation state. It might therefore be useful for those working in the New Englishes paradigm in Africa to seriously consider developing paradigms where language in use is situated in transitional and transnational social networks. Such models have already begun to be developed in migration research in which the state is conceptualized as an imagined community (Anderson 1983), or through the narration of the nation (Hall 1995). Unless such a conceptual shift is made away from a nation state towards more transitional networks, research in Englishes will nd it dicult to account for the eects of Africas voluntary and involuntary massive migration on language use. Because of the massive migration both within and across borders, speakers of Nigerian, Zambian, South African English rarely live in isolation from other nationalities. There are three main types of English users in Africa: i. monolingual English speakers, a majority of whom are white and settled in South Africa. ii. English/African language bilinguals with English as a second language (ESL). iii. Trilingual speakers uent in English/French or English/Portuguese and an African language. For these trilingual speakers, English is a foreign language. The trilingual speakers are largely but not exclusively in Lusophone and Francophone Africa. Lanham and Macdonald (1979) distinguishes between three types of varieties of White South African English, also called General South African English: conservative, respectable, and extreme. Conservative is based on what White South Africans perceive to be Received Pronunciation respectable is a locally cultivated South African variety, associated with middle class South Africans. Extreme SAE is associated with lowly educated and low social class White South Africans (Gough 1996xii). If the other types of English users in Africa, apart from the White South Africans are framed in terms of Kachrus (1986) and Graddols (1996) concentric circles model of inner, and outer then the bilingual ESL group can be categorized as belonging to the outer circle. Such outer circle speakers are said to be norm-dependent. Trilingual speakers can be situated within the expanding circle (Kachru 1992: 2). But how applicable is this model to Africa? If most speakers do not have access to native speakers of English in everyday encounters is it really feasible to claim that they are norm-dependent. Instead of using the construct of norm-dependence it may be more appropriate to refer to the use of English in such contexts as examples of what Pennycook describes as crucial acts of semiotic reconstruction (Pennycook 2003). Norm-dependency also undermines what NE framework seeks to celebrate, namely the creativity of non-native speakers of English. The NE framework purports to move from linguistic authoritarianism of the native speaker variety to a speech fellowship-specic realism (Kachru 1995: 25), and thus ostensibly displaces the construct of the native speaker as central organizing principle. Yet norm-dependency reintroduces it by the backdoor. The Kachru framework in such a context appears to apply double standards. This ambivalence towards the epistemological role of English arises because English is dened through cross-referential or anaphoric meaning, which depends on the meaning of English in its native habitat. (Dasgupta 1993: 48), rather than being seen potentially independent, locally and contextually determined reference system the dictionary draws the readers attention to semantic links between
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South African English with those found, for example, in the English of Britain, the United States, Jamaica, or Nigeria (Silva: 1998: xv). There are also further problems with the applicability of the NE in Africa. There are no principled reasons why some linguistic forms are selected as typical of NE and other hybrid forms excluded. For example, it is not clear why Owusu-Ansah identies some features as typical of Ghanaian English and excludes others. Similarly, there are no principled reasons why Gough (1996) selects the following features as typical instantiations of General South African English, African English, Colored English, South African Indian English:
General South African English a. Busy as a marker of the progressive: Im busy cooking b. Reduplication of adverb now as now-now, which denotes either immediately or soon. African English a. Use of indenite article before certain non-count nouns: He was carrying a luggage. b. Use of do or did in unemphasized statements and questions: I did tell him to come: Who did throw that? (Mesthrie 1993: 31) Coloured English a. Use of the dative of advantage: Im gonna buy me a new car b. Retention of ordinary question order in indirect questions with the verb be: I dont know whats that (Mesthrie 1989: 6).
Each of the above varieties is best construed as part of a continuum. It is indeed possible that the above features represent the English used by dierent ethnic and racial groups in South Africa. It is, however, not clear what criteria were used to determine which linguistic features fall under each ethnic/racial category. Consequently, methodologically, NE reads like an elitist standardization of periphery Englishes relying on the prescriptive and elitist tendencies of center linguistics which the framework wants to distance itself from (Canagarajah 1999: 180) another telling example of intellectual double standards! If the descriptions of the ethnic/racial Englishes cited above are largely linguistic, an alternative approach which is largely political emerged in what was referred to as Peoples English. This perspective emphasizes the role which English played in shaping the identities of African users of English in South Africa during the apartheid Peoples English is political because it represents a challenge to the current status of English in South Africa in which control of the language, access to the language, and the teaching of the language are entrenched within apartheid structures (Norton Peirce1995: 108; see also Norton Peirce 1989). The objective of Peoples English was to wrestle the control of English from white South African native speakers. With the strategic advantage of hindsight a decade after the end of apartheid we can safely say Peoples English failed to meet its political objectives, because English in South Africa is now rmly within the hands of white South African native speakers perhaps even more so than it was during the apartheid era. Since the NE are describing the English used by formally educated Africans, some insights into African responses to notions about NE would be revealing. Educated African users of English nd the categories Nigerian or Ghanaian English sociolinguistically oensive as Ko Sey, the founding father of Ghanain English Linguistics wrote, thus anticipating the discussion of NE in Africa:
Nothing disgusts an educated Ghanaian more than being told that the English he uses is anything but standard. The linguist may be able to isolate features of Ghanaian English and describe them. But once these are made known to him, the educated Ghanaian would strive to avoid them altogether. The surest way to kill Ghanaian English, if it really exists, is to discover it and make it known to him. (Sey 1973: 10)
One of the most powerful arguments advanced in support of the NE framework is its supposed inclusivity, underwritten by a heterogeneous philosophy and not the homogeneity typical of
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discourses of monolithic English emerging from Anglo-American centers. But from whose perspective is English heterogeneous or inclusive? In comparison with or as a challenge to the monolithic and centrist views of English in AngloAmerican centers, the NE framework is clearly inclusive. But in the context of the language spoken and understood by the majority of Africans, it is clearly not inclusive at all. Even when the localized varieties of English are taken into account they clearly exclude a large majority of Africans who use pidgins and creoles (Mufwene 1998). Speakers who do not use English, that is the majority of Africans do not perceive any linguistic distinctions between British Standard English and Africanized adaptations of English. It is not possible to distinguish between types of what you do not know. In other words, for non-English users distinctions between British English and Africanized Englishes are rightly construed as part of the language games of professional elites. English whether adapted or not remains an elitist code. Therefore, from the perspective of nonEnglish speakers the homogeneity/heterogeneity distinction is not relevant. That NE, in contrast to popular French-should be so class marked is highly signicant, and part of an important sociolinguistic process-particularly in South Africa as a caste-like social stratication is gradually replaced by social class. Paulston (personal communication 2004) points to a growing middle class of people of color and concurrently the growing number of private schools where English is one of the, if not the primary, means of instruction. Belief in the neutrality of English will foreclose discussion in an important area of research at exactly the time when we need to focus on the complex interaction between social class and language. Pennycook (2003) takes this further in forging a connection between the apparent tolerance of dierent variations of NE with an already achieved world-wide dominance. Applied linguistic concerns: The role of the non-native teacher Given the amount of research which has been carried out on NE, and the contributions of non-native English teachers in Africa, it is odd that there is very limited research which has focused on the role of the non-native teacher of English in the teaching and learning of English in Africa; yet the nonnative teacher is increasingly becoming a focus of educational research in North American and European research (Kramsch 1993, 2002, 2004). Research into English in Africa also needs to examine much more systematically the nature of the relationship between the teaching of English and the use of English particularly in the workplace. Insights from such research will not only be useful linguistically, but might have an impact in terms of African governance as well. Some scholars (King 1986) attribute the slow functioning of African bureaucracy to the hesitation to commit ideas to paper in English! Constructing indigeneity Language planning in Africa is a rapidly expanding and contentious area. (Ridge 2001; Roy-Campbell 2003, 2002; Kamwangamalu 1998; Moyo 2003; Omoniyi 2003). One of the central concepts underlying language planning is the notion of indigenous languages. The objective of this section is to examine how indigeneity is constructed. Our goal is not to provide an overview of language planning in Africa, especially since a number of excellent overviews already exists (cf. Fafunwa et al.1989; Bambgose 1976, 1991; Mazrui 2000). These texts should be read in conjunction with Robert Kaplan and Richard Baldauf s edited monographs on Current Issues in language planning which focus on individual African countries. To date monographs have been written on Botswana, South Africa (Nkonko Kamwangamalu), Tunisia, Ivory Coast (Paulin Djite), Malawi (Edrinnie Kayambazinthu), Nigeria. Monographs on other African countries are also being prepared. The construct of indigenous languages is signicant for two reasons. At a very general level, it involves local knowledge (Geertz 1983), a vital ingredient in the growth of applied linguistics in Africa. At a more specic level, since one of the purported objectives of language planning is to ensure the survival of indigenous languages against the encroachment of dominant languages, the
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discussion is relevant to language planning. Our main objectives here are neither to suggest that applied linguistics in Africa should dispense with western modern sciences, nor simply oppose local knowledge with western knowledge, but to initiate a discussion which would lead towards a construction of a more legitimate framework for understanding site specic applied linguistics and western applied linguistics. Seen from a dierent perspective, Western applied linguistics is in itself local from a dierent perspective. The concept of indigenous languages been used extensively in academic discussions of language planning in Africa, usually with a focus on the technical, pedagogic, and economic contexts rather than on the conceptualization of the construct of indigenous languages itself (cf. Stroud 2002). Although, the concept of indigenous has not been analyzed critically, it has even acquired a quasi-legal status in the Organization of African Unity (Organisation De lUnit Africaine) Language Plan of Action and the 1996 Constitution of the Republic of South Africa. In the Founding Provisions of the 1996 South African Constitution all the indigenous languages are ocial languages, but not all ocial languages are necessarily indigenous languages. In spite of quasi-legal status of indigenous languages in these signicant documents there are four questions which we seek to raise: 1. 2. 3. 4. How valid is the binary distinction between indigenous languages and ex-colonial languages? To what extent is the notion of the indigenous a postcolonial reaction to the legacy of colonialism, rather than a description of a pre-colonial state of aairs? In what ways is the construct of the indigenous itself part of western nomenclature? If you racialise and ethnicise epistemology through the use of constructs such as the indigenous are we not reinforcing colonial thinking?
The term indigenous languages is used uncritically in applied linguistics, even though the term indigenous is regarded as problematic in anthropology and political science. The term was used interchangeably with the so-called customary law, and traditional medicine. The term gained wide currency after it was used extensively by Warren et al. in developmentalist discourses. Mamdani demonstrates the problematic nature of the construct, when he writes:
The anthropologist considered the illiterate native a more reliable authority on customary law than the literate native, the authority was construed in terms of a primary source, to be sifted through, analyzed, its central contradictions smoothed over, its gaps and lapses lled in, all to arrive at a coherent, consistent, and comprehensive secondary formulation. (Mamdani 1996: 113)
Mamdanis analysis shows that indigenous knowledge systems (IKS) were seen by the colonialists not as true representatives of a pre-colonial past, but as products of their intervention. Hence, those accounts, whereby indigenous systems-including languages-become representative of a pre-colonial era, reect a postcolonial orientation to colonialism rather than an accurate analysis of a pre-colonial social and historical state. Indigenous languages were created through a process of mediation which is irreversible. Breckenbridge and van de Veers account of India resonates here very well with the African experience.
The very languages that are called native are products of an intricate dialectic between colonial projects of knowledge and the formation of group identities (Breckenbridge and van de Veer1993). Notions about customary law, traditional medicine, ethnocosmology undermine the holism of indigenous knowledge. (Semali and Kinchele 1999: 21)
Fortune who played a key role in descriptions of Bantu languages takes the argument further still when he observes that the separation of language from cultural practices as implied in structuralist descriptions of African languages is inconsistent with an African world view (Fortune 1977). Reformulating Fortunes argument we can say that the idea of African grammars having an ontological existence outside discourse and cultural practices is part of a tradition of African
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linguistic scholarship which in its preoccupation with grammar and linguistic structure often metaphorized as bringing grammar and structure to the languages (Blommaert 1999: 178). The complex dialectic which Breckenbridge and van der Veer has in mind is analogous to Mamdanis secondary formulation. Both complex dialectic and secondary formulation highlight the fact that the institutions may not be as natural/indigenous to Africa as we may be inclined to believe. That the secondary formulation and by implication unnaturalness was not restricted to customary law, and traditional medicine but extended to the so-called indigenous languages as well can be illustrated by analyzing how European oriented meanings emerged in African vernaculars. A close analysis of indigenous language raises issues about what is natural and what is not in indigenous languages. What is authentically African in indigenous languages are the linguistic forms, the meanings of the words arose as a result of active social intervention. On the basis of linguistic evidence drawn from chiShona, a language used in Zimbabwe, and phonetic examples from Luwo, Lugbara and Ateso/Akarimojong spoken largely in Uganda. In order to demonstrate how some of the European meanings of African words were created, distributed, circulated and legitimated-drawing on some of the work by Jeater & Hove (in press) we focus on an analysis of the Mashonaland Quarterly (MQ). The MQ was launched in 1925 at Morgenster Mission. The mission station was run and administered by the Dutch Reformed Church. Geographically Morgenster is situated in south-central parts of Zimbabwe. The MQ is an ideal text to analyze because it was the rst publication to be used by Europeans in then Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) to communicate their world views to an African audience on issues about education, religion and how to carry out small scale farming. Since it was the rst such publication, an analysis of the use of some of the lexical items will give us insights into how the meanings of some words were recongured rendering them amenable to control. The term vanhu in chiShona for example, meant people, a generic word category not marked for race. After European intervention the term Vatema emerged within the MQ and in subsequent publications on chiShona, to refer to Black people. It replaced the generic vanhu: a creation of meanings for Europeans. The replacement of vanhu with vatema introduced racial distinctions which were absent in indigenous thoughts (Jeater and Hove in press). In a dierent noun class the root tema is nhema which means color nhema (black cow) and kutaura nhema (lies) creating a collocation linking in the MQ and subsequent standard chiShona publications, which links racial categorization with lies. Although Africans were racially categorized, the Europeans did not use such categories to refer to themselves in African vernaculars. They simply referred to themselves in terms of their social status as bosses or masters using the word murungu. The term reected social status and not racial categorization. Africans referred to Europeans as vasinamabvi those without knees meaning a people who couldnt bend to work on their knees, grinding, and digging, or as mabvakure. By sharp contrast to the racial categories about Africans central for the Europeans, there was no racial marking in African descriptions of either Europeans, nor in reference to themselves. (Jeater 2002; Jeater and Hove in press). Furthermore, Europeans frequently described Africans in the possessive: wanhu wedu watema wari mu Afrika (our people who are in Africa)(Jeater and Hove in press) Since European world views were embedded in the constructed vernaculars, the development of literacy in indigenous languages involved a shift away from an indigenous world perspective towards a European based one. The introduction of European perspectives on African linguistic forms was not restricted to the lexicon only, it is also evident phonetically, for example in the superimposition of ve vowels on Eastern Nilotic languages, and the absence of a standard orthography for Lwo, Lugbara and Ateso/ Akarimojong (Walusimbi 2002: 15). African scholars have argued quite forcefully for the use of indigenous languages as medium of instruction highlighting the problematic nature of using so-called excolonial languages (Bamgbose
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1976; Rubagumya 1998; Fafunwa et al. 1989). What has been absent from the debate is an analysis of the assumptions about language, and education which form the basis of the construct of medium in medium of instruction. The notion of medium seems to be based on a Lockean idea of communication and instruction through language as telementation the transference of messages from one mind to another (Cameron 1990: 55; Makoni and Pennycook in press). This is only possible if one accepts the idea of African languages as xed codes. The construct of medium of instruction also seems to reinforce the notion of instruction as consisting of a transference of information from the teacher to the student. The idea of medium of instruction thus reinforces a hierarchical relationship between teachers and students, and validates a one way ow of information. That the learning through and the teaching of English creates problems for learning in Africa is a well known fact. A logical but inaccurate inference to draw from such studies is, however, that the use of indigenous languages as medium of instruction of instruction will be a panacea to Africas educational problems. The lesson we can draw from the above analysis of indigenous languages is that there is a danger of falling prey falling prey to reductionist western binarism between excolonial and indigenous languages and thus to overlook the imprint of colonialism/European perspectives on indigenous languages. The use of the term indigenous may be politically correct, but it is a romantic, idealistic and ahistorical notion, subverting the eorts to address contemporary African language problems. Its use also highlights the dangers of an ethnicising and racializing epistemology which reinforces the very categories which the analyst is tying to escape from. The notion of indigenous languages is founded on a conception of language as made up of discrete units, which Grace (forthcoming) refers to as Autonomous Text Languages (AT), whose primary function is to serve as codes for expository prose for communicating factual information by encoding and decoding propositions (Grace forthcoming). Such a conceptualization is problematic. The idea of indigenous languages as AT languages is a continuation of a long prescriptive tradition in western epistemology and cultural history. In other words, the notion of indigenous languages is an heir to western cultural history. It is a product of anthropological discourse about the other, which has analytically tried to supercede the discourses of racial and biological inferiority as a way of framing and conceptualizing dierences. Clearly, indigeneity is a much more welcome concept for explaining dierence than that of racial and biological inferiority. However, the discourses of indigeneity remain western constructs which do not successfully capture how indigenous people experience themselves. More importantly the discourses of indigeneity emerge from a series of unsuccessful development discourses, and thus oer only an apparent escape from the evolutionary and scientistic paradigms of applied linguistics. Epistemologically, Mufwene (2002: 393) reviewing Nettle and Romaine demonstrates that the use of indigenous is exemplied in sentences such as the greatest biolinguistic diversity is found in areas inhabited by indigenous peoples (Nettle and Romaine 2000: ix, see also page, 13, 21, and 22 for what Mufwene calls semantic oddities in the use of indigenous). Although the usage is odd, it is politically revealing because it erases from view indigenous populations in Western Europe, creating the impression that Western Europe is one of those places without indigenous populations! (Mufwene 2002: 393). From indigenous to endogenous Although the signications of the concept of endogenisation have been explored (Devisch 1999; Crossman 2002; Crossman and Devisch 2002), the concept itself was coined by French-speaking West African scholars (Ki-Zerbo 1990; Hountodji 1977, 1995; Ela 1994, 1995, 1998) in an eort to avoid some of the historical baggage and misunderstandings that have accrued to the term indigenous and its derivatives in both French and English. In French the term has acquired bad connotations because of the wide spread use of the homonym indigent. With the exception of econometrics, the term endogenous has not been used in the social sciences. It has however been
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used to good eect in botany revealing the key dierences between the two terms i.e. indigenous and endogenous. Here indigenous primarily refers to a species that is native to a particular topography while endogenous denotes a plants capacity to develop on the basis of its own resources, or growing or originating from within Concise Oxford Dictionary 9th Ed.) The major dierence here is that topographical denition tends to portray the subject as static, its only descriptor being a quasipermanent link to a geographic locality or area, whereas the second allows for a more organic and dynamic understanding in that it evokes autonomously oriented growth (Crossman 2004: 24). Reecting on endogeneity The construct of endogeneity clearly has the advantage that it enables us to capture, hybridity, dierence and mobility more eectively than indigeneity. In a sub-discipline of applied linguistics such as language planning in which scholarship and political activism merge it is important to be aware that hybridity, dierence and mobility are not necessarily always liberating. For example, for refugees in Africa(and Africa currently has the largest number of refugees in the world) a certain immobility, a xed place to call home is an urgent need. In contexts of state terror and mystication, clinging to the primacy of the concept of truth can be a powerful and necessary form of resistance. The master narratives of the Enlightenment do not seem particularly repressive here, and the concept of truth is not uid or unstable on the contrary (Hardt and Negri 2000: 155). Hybridity is another postmodern construct which has come under criticism in applied linguistics for not being grounded in material reality. This is frustrating because at a historical juncture when Third World scholars are celebrating their identities they quickly realize that Postmodern discourses deny them of their particularity (Canagarajah personal communication). It is crucial to extend Canagarajahs argument by stressing that as a notion hybridity is a metaphor originating from taxonomic biology. It is founded on the presupposition that the ospring-the hybrid is a heterogeneous mixture of relevant constituent parts. On the one hand, it is founded on the assumptions of purity/essentialism, on the other, purity itself is an epistemological construction because every pure form is a hybrid by one criteria or other (Bauman and Briggs 2003: 5). Hybridity is the result of the appropriation which takes place in all contexts of cultural encounters. However, even though hybridity takes place in moments of cultural encounters, its usage is unfortunately restricted to describe the cultural appropriation by colonized subjects leading Lynn Mario de Souza to make the pertinent observation: So when a former colonized appropriates he is called a hybrid as if the former colonizing cultures and persons are above hybridity (Lynn Mario de Souza personal communication). We therefore conclude that hybridity, like indigeniety are two of the terms used in applied linguistics to consolidate the description of the Other. Educational research into the teaching of indigenous languages either as L1, or L2 is still at an early stage, yet in spite of limited research two trends are emerging in Africa. First, in countries like Zimbabwe language teaching materials and syllabuses are designed for second language speakers to teach L1 speakers. In Nigeria, the opposite is the case, L2 speakers of Hausa, Igbo, and Yoruba typically use materials designed for L1 users. Perhaps the issue worth addressing here is whether within African contexts L1 and L2 distinctions are applicable or pedagogically of much relevance. Even if such distinctions were valid, the scarcity of material resources makes the production of materials tergeted specically at either L1 or L2 users of African languages unlikely. In such situations what is important is the training of teachers in methods of adapting their materials and methodologies to suit the appropriate sociolinguistic situation. African applied linguists are in an enviable position which enable them to create opportunities to formulate alternative ways of thinking, if they seriously take issues about African languages. Most applied linguists working in Africa have a real footing in at least two or more cultures. It is reasonable to expect from them an interest in examing the dierent ways in which knowledge about language is constructed in the communities they are aliated to. It has been suggested that a large percentage
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of English metalanguage is constructed around the conduit metaphor. If English is organized around a conduit metaphor African languages are not necessarily organized around a similar metaphor. For example, most of the Hausa (spoken in west Africa) is constructed around ontological metaphors which provide ways of viewing it as events, emotions, ideas, touch, and smell. Reecting on research on African multlingualism at the level of the individual African sociolinguistics seems to nd itself in an anomalous situation. On the one hand, it has argued quite vociferously against the continued use of so-called ex-colonial languages in education particularly English and French, because such policies marginalize African indigenous languages. On the other hand, African sociolinguistic research into individual African multilingualism seems to be organized around the very same languages which are an object of sustained African critique. Although a majority of African individual multilingualism includes languages other than English and French, most of the studies nevertheless comprise either English or French and an African language. Wollf (2000) cites a sample of 20 studies which all follow this pattern. In other words, there was no study in which bilingualism consisted only of a combination of exclusively African languages, or of a bilingualism in which Africans spoke either a pidgin or a Creole and an indigenous language. Yet arguably even such types of bilingualism are much more widespread than those which include an African language and either French English, or Portuguese (Lucko, Peter and Wolf 2003). Popular and standard French in Africa In this section we examine issues relating to French in the so-called Francophone countries. In our discussion we are excluding the literature which is gradually developing which focuses on French in former British colonies (cf. Omoniyi 2003 for his account of French in Nigeria). Following Djite (1998) we maintain a distinction between SF also called French French in local Ivorian idiom and Popular French (PF). PF is a local simplied non-elite variety of SF. For example, the variety of PF in the Ivory Coast-one of the Francophone countries is referred to as Franais de Moussa. It has a simplied verb system, is characterized by a general absence of articles, and has phonetic and prosodic features strongly inuenced by African languages (Djite 2000: 35).
Table 3. Some examples of Popular French Popular French Cest verse Abidjan Ilveunt mouiller mon pain Tout pres n est pas loin prs nest pas loin
(Djite 2000: 34).
Standard French Cest chose courante Abidjan Il veut me crer des ennuis Maintenant
English This is a common thing in Abidjan He wants to get me into trouble Lets do it here and now
Not only does PF adapt SF to local African contexts. It is also slowly becoming a linguistic pastiche drawing selectively from other languages in the Ivorian landscape such as English, and Dyula (the local lingua Franca) as apparent in expressions such as Boro d enjaillment. Enjaillment is a PF adaptation of English enjoyment (Djite 2000: 35). Typically PF is used as the language of non-elites. It is also used extensively in publications with a mass circulation such as popular drama, cartoons, and newspapers targeted at the lowly educated, even in a national daily newspaper such as Ivoire-Dimanche. PF is predominantly a combination of Standard French, and local African languages, and at times it also includes elements from Standard English. PF is thus increasingly becoming a lexical pastiche and going beyond being a simple adaptation of SF only. Sociolinguistically, PF is unlike NE
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because the latter is an elite code for educated speakers, while PF is a code widely used by lowly educated persons. Paradoxically, the policy of legislating the use of French only as the medium of instruction from kindergarten to university has resulted in the spread of locally adapted versions of French, PF. By contrast, the British policy of introducing indigenous languages and subsequently shifting to English has limited the spread of English, and restricted the use of NE to the educated class. Wyclie international and the summer institute of linguistics international This section reviews some of the work carried out by the WI formerly Wyclie Bible Translators (WBT) cum SIL. There are four main reasons for carefully reviewing the work by WI/SILI. First, the WI/SILI is one of the most expansive organizations involved in applied linguistics in Africa. Secondly, it has taken part in applied linguistics for a relatively long period of time, in some cases for over half a century. Thirdly, it has contributed directly towards shaping the nature of applied linguistics in Africa by creating administrative structures within which applied linguistics in Africa is conducted. Fourthly, although the work of the WI/SILI has been carefully reviewed in Latin America and the Pacic Region we are not aware of any such review in Africa. We therefore see this contribution as preliminary review of the work by an important player in applied linguistics in Africa. The WI/SILI has had a dual identity since the WBT & SIL were institutionalized separately in the US in 1942. This dual identity of the WI/SILI has served the organization well. It enables WI/SILI personnel to play missionaries at home and linguists abroad (Havalkof and Aaby 1981: 10). WBT/SIL was founded by Cameron Townsend. In 1934 he established camp Wyclie in an abandoned farmhouse near Sulphur Springs Aarkansas in the United States and held the rst summer course in linguistics for two students (Havalkof and Aaby 1981: 10). WBT is the domestic arm of the SILI tasked with the responsibility for raising funds within the US, while the SILI does the missionizing and applied linguistics abroad as it brings the Word to the Bibleless tribes and to preserve languages. Reviewing the impact of applied linguistics of the WI/SILI is necessary because it is one of the biggest organizations working on language in Africa. In some countries it has worked on African languages for over half a century. In Cameroon it has been active since 1969, in Benin since 1981. Its activities in other parts of Africa are much more recent. For example, it initiated its activities in the Chad in 1989. WI/SILI has worked in language development which they construe as translation, literacy, and the development of orthographies and the recording of local folklores. The range of its work is apparent when one takes a look at the bibliography of the 2002/3 SILI Africa Area report where it catalogues the list of activities which the SILI was engaged in. Below is an extract of the Africa Area Report cited below:
Other literacy activities, events and milestones A primer workshop was held to train individuals and language teams to design eective basic primers for local languages. Fourteen Central Africans and one Congolese participated alongside several SILI members. Eight languages were represented. Booklets containing 10 lessons each were designed for CARs Bogoto, Gbanu, Gbeya, Kaba, Manza, and Ngbugu languages (Area Report: 2002/3: 22)
WI/SILI established administrative centers which have played a key role in applied linguistics in Africa. For example, setting up the Ghana Institute of Languages in 1962, and in 1974 a Translation Center in Abidjan (the Ivory Coast). In the Central African Republic it has worked in close cooperation with the Institut de Linguistique Applique (ILA). In Mali it works closely with the Institut des Langues Abdoulaye (ILAB), and in Chad with the Linguistics department at the University of NDjamena.
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A review of the WI/SILI raises important issues which are not unique to Africa but which do seem to acquire special poignancy in Africa. Since a majority of American applied linguists working through the SILI are missionaries. This raises issues about the nature of the relationship between applied linguistics and religion particularly that of Christianity. To what extent do SILI or the local Africans perceive applied linguistics as a secular exercise? (Snow 2001). The relationship between applied linguistics and religion has not been systematically examined in Africa. Smiths writing about Peru in Latin America resonates with our African experiences: native peoples under the inuence of the WI/SILI, have become fundamentalist Christians as they become literate. They are oered no choice. Because of the impact of the WI/SILI, literacy and bilingualism have become intertwined with Christianity, dicult to separate from applied linguistics as a secular project. Bilingualism and literacy are therefore seen as ways of projecting Christian ways of thinking. Another issue tied to the SILI is their impact on indigenous languages particularly their objective to translate the bible into all of the worlds languages. There are two key issues which the work of the WI/SILI on indigenous languages raises. Firstly, SILI members are astute and highly motivated at learning African languages. Their learning of the vernaculars has, perhaps rightly, been characterized as motivated by the desire not to learn the meaning of things, but to acquire the means of transmitting their own message. The learning of African languages in such contexts results in a sophisticated use of vernaculars to articulate profoundly European modes of thought. The idea of translating the bible into all of African languages however commendable it might be, is based on the assumption that there are a denite number of discrete languages in Africa-an issue which is quite controversial in African linguistics. Philosophically, the orientation towards African languages on which the translation of African languages into all of Africas languages is based on a descriptive tradition which focuses on linguistic structure rather than linguistic praxis (Blommaert 1999: 178). Christian English teachers: The need for prayerful thoughts If the focus of the SILI was on indigenous languages the main focus of the Christian English Teachers (CET) as might be expected is on English. English has been conceptualized in a number of dierent ways. In this section we focus on a way of conceptualizing English which does not yet have wide currency in applied linguistics, namely English as a missionary language (EML) (cf. Pennycook and Coutard-Marin 2003). It is intriguing that in spite of the magnitude of the EML project it has not been the focus of systematic study in applied linguistics perhaps because it is a type of English which is more widely spread in non-western contexts than in Anglo-American communities. Nonwestern perspectives or the perspectives of the other easily reveals the connection between English and religion, particularly Christianity in this case. Christian English Teachers (CETS) explicitly state that English is not only a western language but a Christian language as well. The framing of English as a Christian language is particularly important because it brings English Language Teaching directly into potential conict with Islam. Because of the link between Christianity and English the African student who associates English with conversion to Christianity is not completely wrong, because it is indeed the type of connection which CETS and EML would like language learners/converts to make. In other words, the distinction between religious conversion and linguistic categories on which some, if not most, of western applied linguistic research is predicated may be dicult to sustain both theoretically and in practice in non-western contexts. Concluding remarks In the concluding section we propose some strategies which may be pursued to consolidate applied linguistics in Africa. Some of the problems confronting this project are typical of the African academy, while others may be peculiar to applied linguistics as a discipline. Hence some of the strategies we are proposing are generally applicable to the African academy, while others may be much more specically relevant to applied linguistics only.
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One of the suggestions we proposed recently to the AILA Executive to enhance the development of applied Linguistics in Africa was to encourage the formation of more national and regional associations in Africa. On the face of it such a recommendation seems reasonable because to date the Southern African Association of Applied Linguistics in Africa (SAALA) is the only AILA aliated association in the entire African continent. However, eorts to set up newer national or regional applied linguistics associations in the rest of Africa have to date not been successful, and are unfortunately unlikely to succeed in the foreseeable future. Most of African countries with the exception of Nigeria, and South Africa do not have a critical mass of applied linguists to make the formation of national or regional associations of applied linguistics a viable alternative. The formation of Applied Linguistics Associations are also likely to fail because they will be faced with an acute shortage of nancial and material resources necessary for a successful administration of the Associations-a problem which would not be unique to Applied Linguistic Associations, but one which they would share with the African academy generally. For national and regional associations to function successfully they will have to depend to a large degree on the generosity of the African nation/state. Unfortunately, African state authorities have not been forthcoming in their nancial support of the academy Regarding African scholarship more as a threat than a constructive stake holder. They have thrown African scholarship to the winds. So o we go, riding into the sunset, looking for kinder masters and honorable or dishonorable patrons (Prah 1998: 28). A more modest but perhaps more feasible strategy standing a better chance of succeeding is the strengthening of already existing academic networks through the exchange of external examiners and shared doctoral supervision. Facilitating more intellectual exchanges between African applied linguists within Africa would enhance South to South cooperation which could be complemented by well structured North to South cooperation. Unfortunately, the success of North to South collaboration has been varied and has been subjected to severe criticism by some Northern European scholars for enhancing rather than reducing African dependence on the North (Devisch 2004: 15; Gaillard, Krishna and Waast 1997; Yesufu 1973). African academy generally, and applied linguistics in Africa in particular has not escaped the criticism, perhaps rightly so-, of being psychologically and academically unduly dependent upon Northern scholarship. Mazrui and others have argued that rather than being a source of development, the African university has played a key role as an agent of neo-dependency by perpetuating academic and cultural dependency upon the North. African universities have been the highest transmitters of Western culture in African societies (Mazrui 1992: 105). The key strategy which has been proposed to overcome African academic and cultural dependency on the North is what is referred to in African studies as the eort to domesticate the modern project, what has been felicitously described by Chakrabarty an Asian scholar (1992) as provincialising the west. By this we mean eorts to bridge the gap between the contexts in which some of the applied linguistic ideas are generated and the contexts in which they are subsequently applied in Africa. The mediation is a common practice in applied linguistics but it becomes even more so in Africa because the theoretical ideas which underpin our work in Africa are not typically produced with Africa in mind. This is not to say that ideas generated elsewhere are not relevant to applied linguistics in Africa but that their relevance has to be demonstrated rather than assumed. Applied linguistics in Africa has to constantly distinguish between that which is globally current and that which is locally relevant if it is to be a problem-oriented discipline. Unfortunately in some cases that which is locally relevant might be regarded as outdated in other regions in which applied linguistics is practiced. This creates pressures for applied linguists in Africa which scholars in other regions might not necessarily feel: a need to constantly refer to some work which is globally current, even if it is not immediately relevant, so as to protect the quality of their work in the eyes of their western colleagues. Although there is a growing interest in the development of local versions of applied Linguistics in Africa, the prestigious journals in Applied Linguistics and indeed in most
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disciplines are published in English and from western locations (Cangarajah 2002: 254). In such contexts, and irrespective of subject matter and methodology, African scholars are underprivileged in relation to western colleages especially when quality of scholarship is assessed in terms of frequency of publishing in internationally refereed journals (Crossman 2004). There are more publications in internationally refereed journals by western scholars on Africa than by African scholars themselves! The domestication of modernity does not, however, exclude the use of western sources but proposes that they cannot remain the centre of gravity of knowledge of Africa. They should be complemented by (Prah 1998: 27) drawing parallels between African applied linguistics and utilizing other non-western sources from other Third World communities such as India, Latin America and indeed even immigrant communities in North America and Europe (Spivak 1987). The domestication of modernity also has an important methodological dimension. It requires that African applied linguistics be both local and national before it can become fully international. It cannot proceed in the opposite direction i.e. from being international to the local. This should not be construed to mean that African applied linguistics should not be concerned with international readership. It simply means that applied linguistics in Africa can only arrive at internationalism through the local. If local applied linguistics has sucient cognitives cold it will soon register internationally (Prah 1998; Ki-Zerbo 1990; Ngugi wa Thiongo 1993). Failure to achieve this has adverse eects not only on the type of African scholarship but on sta retention because African institutions ions in a single minded pursuit of excellence have trained researchers with little stamina to address issues about development which ostensibly they should be spearheading (Mamdani 1993: 15). Domestication of modernity unless handled circumspectly has serious pitfalls. It seems to encourage a proliferation of academic material claiming to be presenting African perspectives or African Voices. Such approaches although clearly welcome create the impression that academic authority is determined by cultural aliation. When expertise is determined solely or largely by cultural aliation we run the danger of losing an invaluable opportunity to develop a reexive relationship between applied linguistics and African constituencies-something which should be a hallmark of applied linguistics in Africa. The development of applied linguistics in Africa has also been adversely aected by the scarcity of academic materials with an African focus. Serious eorts to address this lack of resources is gradually being redressed in that there is some progress in the development of academic materials with African perspectives. For example, the following is a list of some of the notable publications seeking explicitly to develop African perspectives: Spencer (1971a) Colonial Language Policies and their legacies Spencer (1971b) The English Language in West Africa Mazrui (1975) The Political Sociology of the English language: an African experience Adegbija E (1994) Language attitudes in Sub-Saharan Africa. Robinson (1986) Language use in a rural development: an African perspective. Mazrui and Mazrui (1998) The Power of Babel. Language Governance in the African experience. Webb and Kembo-Sure (1999) African voices: an introduction to the languages and linguistics of Africa.
Some of the publications not only focus on Africa but seek to compare African experiences with the experiences of other ethnic minorities particularly in North America. A recent example, of such scholarship is Makoni, et al. (2003) Black Linguistics, a study of the social, political and linguistic problems of languages in Africa and the Americas. Most of these Africa based materials have the explicit objective of developing African-oriented training programs because as Webb and Kembo-Sure aptly observe:
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most introductory textbooks in linguistics are (understandably, we suppose) shaped by North American or British/European perspectives while students of linguistics in Africa need, in addition to the knowledge, insights, and skills, relevant to Africa. (Webb and Kembo-Sure 1999: x)
Initiatives for the development of Africa based materials is progressing not only in Africa but outside Africa as well. For example, Kaplan and Baldauf have initiated a series of monographs as part of the journal of Current Issues in Language Planning. Although focusing on language planning these publications provide useful and up to date information on dierent aspects of the social, political, linguistic and educational aspects of African countries. Monographs on Botswana, South Africa (Kamwangamalu 2000), Malawi (Kayambazinthu 1998; Cte dIvoire (Djite, 2000), Tunisia have already been published and a number of monographs on other African countries may be prepared in future. These monographs update and complement earlier publications reporting on research funded by the Ford Foundation on Language in Africa in the 60s and 70s, for example, John Spencers article Colonial language Policies and their legacies in the edited collection by Thomas Sebeok: Current Trends Linguistics. More recently, a special issue focusing on Applied Linguistics in Africa, AILA Review (16) was published (Makoni and Meinhof 2003). The production of academic materials and syllabi on African applied linguistics should be construed as part of a broader strategy of Africanization or contextualization. In this article we construe Africanization as a strategy to domesticate modernity. Because Africa is socially, and politically and geographically diverse we do not anticipate Africanization to take the same form and expression across Africa (Crossman 2003: 23). This means that a version of applied linguistics might emerge in North Africa which would be dierent from that in southern Africa. It is important to reect on whether it is always and necessarily desirable or indeed feasible to develop African perspectives in applied linguistics and what epistemological objectives which we are seeking to achieve in doing so. Because so much of applied linguistics is based on English scholarship the relevance of assumptions about what constitutes language, being human learning cannot be uncritically accepted. The following are some examples of English linguistic scholarship which have to be carefully scrutinized in applied linguistics in Africa: 1. 2. 3. 4. the belief in distinct word classes the belief in the possibility of using the same descriptive labels for all languages the belief in the separability of language from so-called non-linguistic phenomena the belief in the existence of separate languages. (Mhlhausler 1996: 328)
The development of applied linguistics in Africa demands not only a critical evaluation of western versions of applied linguistics, but more importantly a careful and systematic reexivity clearly articulated by Sole (1997: 215) when he writes:
In my opinion black post-colonial intellectuals cannot accept tenure as spokespeople for their community without the constant interrogation of their own positions demanded by their own poststructuralist predilections. What is most striking about the approaches of both white and black critics of this ilk, though, is a tendency to use post-structuralists techniques when scrutinizing the oppressor, but to slide back into positivism and liberal humanism when faced with the products of the oppressed.
Expressed dierently, the development of African applied linguistics is not likely to succeed as long as the historical construction of what constitutes language remains unquestioned (Heryanto in press). It is also not likely that African applied linguistics will succeed unless it takes full cognizance of the implications arising from the fact that applied linguistics is a western cultural construct, which means that some of the assumptions it makes about language, humanity, learning might need to be questioned. Domestication of modernity has stronger chances of succeeding at this historical juncture
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because parallel reforms are taking place in Europe and America to an extent not possible until postmodernism, and the hiatus between so-called empirical and interpretive traditions in western scholarship (Wallerstein 2001) In spite of these changes, we should not underestimate the material and psychological pressures on scholars on Africa because of the sheer weight of the modernistic western paradigm. Whatever is the ultimate outcome of eorts to develop African perspectives on applied linguistics, there is no shortage of interest in the discussion both within and outside the academy. A constituency demonstrating (surprisingly) special interest in the Africanization of the academy are radical non-formally educated African feminists. Their interests are dierent from those of the African intellectual. They are interested not so much in the impact of African scholarship on the west, but the impact of western scholarship on Africans. It is therefore appropriate to bring this article to a close by giving them a nal say by quoting from one of their representatives, the poet OkotpTek, and her Songs of Lawino, There is no single true son left The entire village Has fallen into the hands of war captives and slaves! Perhaps one of our boys Escaped with his life! Perhaps he is hiding in the bush Waiting for the sun to set But will he come Before the next morning? Will he arrive in time? Bile burns my inside! I feel like vomiting For all our young men Were nished in the forest, Their manhood was nished in the class-rooms, Their testicles were smashed With large books! References
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Rsum Le but de cet article est danalyser la nature des contextes sociaux historiques et contemporains dans lesquels la linguistique applique en Afrique est apparue, et est actuellement pratique. Cet article examine les ds auxquels la linguistique applique locale est confronte lorsquelle essaie de dvelopper des programmes de linguistique applique venant de lEurope et de lAmrique du Nord. Cet article indique que des projets apparemment progressifs de linguistique applique sont troitement lis les uns aux autres en ce sens quils consolident une vue occidentale de lAfrique dans lAfrique post-coloniale. Cet article montre que ces projets, apparemment progressifs, nissent par consolider les perspectives occidentales sur lAfrique et crent un dilemme pour la Linguistique Applique en Afrique car une critique de la linguistique applique occidentale nit pas tre le miroir des thories mmes quelles cherchent rejeter.

Makoni - 2004 Western Perspectives On Applied Linguistics

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Western perspectives in applied linguistics in Africa

Keywords: Western and local perspectives, applied linguistics in Africa

Sinfree Makoni and Ulrike Meinhof

Western perspectives in applied linguistics in Africa

Sinfree Makoni and Ulrike Meinhof

Western perspectives in applied linguistics in Africa

(Kashoki and Mann 1978: 8293).

Swahili (Tanzania) Mapema Sare Osi misicha chakula

English Soon Uniform Oce Girl Food

Sinfree Makoni and Ulrike Meinhof

Western perspectives in applied linguistics in Africa

Sinfree Makoni and Ulrike Meinhof

Western perspectives in applied linguistics in Africa

Sinfree Makoni and Ulrike Meinhof

Western perspectives in applied linguistics in Africa

Sinfree Makoni and Ulrike Meinhof

Western perspectives in applied linguistics in Africa

Sinfree Makoni and Ulrike Meinhof

Western perspectives in applied linguistics in Africa

Sinfree Makoni and Ulrike Meinhof

Western perspectives in applied linguistics in Africa

Sinfree Makoni and Ulrike Meinhof

Western perspectives in applied linguistics in Africa

Sinfree Makoni and Ulrike Meinhof

Western perspectives in applied linguistics in Africa

Sinfree Makoni and Ulrike Meinhof

Western perspectives in applied linguistics in Africa

Sinfree Makoni and Ulrike Meinhof

Western perspectives in applied linguistics in Africa

Sinfree Makoni and Ulrike Meinhof

Western perspectives in applied linguistics in Africa

Sinfree Makoni and Ulrike Meinhof

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